Category: Car Demon

We’re proud to announce the release of Car Demon version 1.7.0!

We’ve packed lots of enhancements into this version.

One of the most exciting features are Vehicle Tags. You now have the ability to create tags for your vehicles and then use the new “vehicle_tag” parameter in the [cd_inventory] shortcode to display only vehicles with that tag.

We’ve also added multiple taxonomy support for the shortcode and search query! This means it is now possible to add multiple values to the following fields in the shortcode: year, make, model, condition, body_style, location & vehicle_tag.

For example, let’s say you wanted to show vans and minivans all on the same page using the shortcode. You can now use the following shortcode to do exactly that!

[cd_inventory body_style="van|minivan"]

We’ve also released a new developer’s documentation area with information on all the filters, actions & constants that are currently available. Be sure to check it out: Car Demon Documentation.

Here’s a complete list of all the changes we’ve made since the last public update:

= 1.7.0 =
*
* Public release version
*
= 1.6.992 =
*
* Modified flush rewrite code on activation
* Added CSS classes to the different vehicle options when tabs are used
* Deprecated old filters starting with car_demon_
* All new filters will start with cd_
*
= 1.6.991 =
*
* Added patch to resolve Yoast SEO issue
*
= 1.6.99 =
*
* Added multiple taxonomy search support for make, model, condition, body style & vehicle tag.
* Multiple taxonomies of the same type can now be added to the shortcode using a pipe | between them.
* Example [cd_inventory make=”ford|gmc”] – this will list all Ford and GMC vehicles
* If year range is searched and the min and max year are the same it will now search the single year and not a false range.
* Added do_actions ‘cd_before_content_srp_action’ & ‘cd_after_content_srp_action’ with parameter $atts
*
= 1.6.98 =
*
* Added filter for vehicle title: car_title_filter
*
= 1.6.97 =
*
* Added constant CD_DEFAULT_CONDITION. If defined Car Demon will set the defined condition to any vehicle that doesn’t have a condition added.
* By default Car Demon will assign preowned to any vehicle that does not have a condition, unless set by the above constant.
* Fixes Issue #25
* Corrected issue preventing 0 price and 0 mileage from saving by default
* If no stock number is saved then post id is added as stock number.
* If sort by price is disabled the initial sort now defaults to mileage. Fixes Issue #26.
* Added vehicle_tag to cars_for_sale custom post type and query. Fixes Issue #17.
*
= 1.6.96 =
*
* Corrected issue with apostrophes in about us tab. Fixes Issue #2.
* Added constant CD_LEGEND_ON_BOTTOM, if defined the option legend will appear on the bottom. Fixes issue #6.
* Added stripslashes_deep to searched by items. Fixes Issue #16
* Added div with clear float to end of VDP. Fixes Issue #23
*
= 1.6.95 =
*
* Added filter cd_price_format_filter to allow filtering number format before display
* Added filter cd_nav_filter to allow filtering the vehicle navigation
* Localized sold yes / no field
*
= 1.6.94 =
*
* Minor change to finance form handler
* Added cd_single_car_content_filter to allow filtering of vehicle description
* Added cd_pre_specs_filter to allow filtering right before the specs are listed

In fact we’ve now made this the default on installation. New installs will create a page called ‘Inventory’ and drop both the search form and inventory shortcodes into it.

The default style is fairly plain, but if you’ve created a filter for your inventory items it will be applied here.

If you’d like a professional style we also offer the “Car Demon Pro Shortcode” plugin. Now you can quickly and easily add a professional responsive inventory layout that you can color match to your theme.

We’ve tried to test it out as fully as possible, but with so many people using Car Demon in so many different ways there’s bound to be an issue or two. If you’ve recently updated and are having an issue please accept our apology and post a comment here so we can investigate the issue and issue patches as needed.

In closing we want to thank everyone for their continued support and look forward to many more updates!

If you’re building a site for any kind of vehicle sales then chances are Car Demon can handle it.

You don’t have to have the “Not Cars” PlugIn to sell other vehicle types, but it does include a few extra functions that switch around the verbiage in the admin area so it makes more sense to anyone updating your site.

If you’re building a site for a client then we highly recommend grabbing a copy of Car Demon Not Cars, your client will thank you for it.

How do I use Car Demon for selling other types of vehicles?

We’re glad you asked! The first thing you want to do is change the URL slug under Car Demon settings.

Let’s say you’re selling boats. Change the slug to something like boats-for-sale. Then re-save your permalinks to update the URL. Now your vehicle listings will appear under http://yoursite.com/boats-for-sale

What about vehicle options?

Obviously the vehicle options for cars are different from the options for a boat. So we’ve made it as easy as possible for you to change these options to match your vehicle type.

After you install it you’ll have an admin area that lets you change the labels in the admin area. Now you have the ability to make the admin menu item say “Boats For Sale” and give your client some peace of mind.

Car Demon – Wicked Powers for MORE than just Car Dealers!

This version has a couple long awaited features, including the ability to change the default URL of your vehicle listings! That’s right, you can now change http://your-site.com/cars-for-sale to something something else like http://your-site.com/inventory or http://your-site.com/classic-cars

We’ve also added a few new filters for all you designers and developers out there.

The car_demon_display_car_list_filter works the same way as car_demon_single_car_filter and uses the same 2 arguments. Now you have the ability to custom tailor the default templates to make them exactly the way you want without needing to create an entire template page for your theme.

We also made several smaller changes to help improve the code base and make Car Demon more efficient. A full list of all changes for 1.4.0 is below.

Change Log for Version 1.4.0

* The cars-for-sale url slug can now be changed on settings page;
* This means your inventory can now be http://yoursite.com/chicago-class-cars;
* It also means you can do http://yoursite.com/inventory or something similar
* Added car_demon_single_car_filter so developers can filter default single car pages
* add_filter(‘car_demon_single_car_filter’, ‘my_car_demon_single_car’,10,2);
* add_filter(‘car_demon_display_car_list_filter’, ‘my_car_demon_car_list’,10,2);
* Then to filter add function my_car_demon_single_car($content, $post_id) etc.
* Added Top mobile menu option
* Added snippet to make sure form css and js don’t load on Admin pages
* Replace time and date code on contact form widget to match other forms
* Moved Custom sales affiliate code to only run on front side of site
* Updated days and years variable in finance form
* Changed search form url to get_bloginfo(‘wpurl’);
* Added css class similar_cars_box_title

Let’s say you want to change some of the default vehicle options. Instead of Stock # you want it called just stock and instead of mileage you want it to say miles and since you only sell Buick’s you want to hide the made.

Car Demon has several robust features that let you customize vehicle options and labels.

First go to your Car Demon’s settings page and find the Tab Options. Now click on the “Edit Vehicle Option Tabs” button.

You’ll see a section for each of the tabs. Expand the Specs Tab and you’ll find options for renaming standard fields or even hiding them.

You’ll also see a section where you can add or remove non-standard options.

You can add or remove additional groups for each tab. If you open the Safety Tab you’ll see it has several groups of options.

You can add or remove groups as needed. If you remove a group or option from a group it doesn’t remove that information for the vehicle if it’s been set. If you recreate a group with the same name and add the same list of options then Car Demon will show the data on the vehicle again.

After you update your information your options should appear on the vehicle edit screen and be reflected on the vehicles.

We hope this post gives you a little more information on how you can customize Car Demon to fit your needs.

The Car Demon PlugIn comes with several shortcodes that you can use to add Car Demon content to your pages.

The code for them can be found in plugins/car-demon/includes/car-demon-shortcodes.php

The first set of shortcodes are for the forms that come with Car Demon.

If you look on the bottom of the Car Demon settings page you’ll see a list of them along with some buttons you can use to create a page with the basic shortcode dropped in.

The shortcodes for the forms have several arguments you can use with them to control how they’re displayed.

send_to – set this to the location name in Car Demon Settingspopup_id – if you set this to a number or a single word name it will hide the form and replace it with a button that pops opens the form into a lightbox. If you want to include multiple forms in a page then just make sure you give each of them a unique popup_id.popup_button – this will change the text of the popup button if you have set a popup_id for the form.

So if you used [contact_us popup_id=”1″ popup_button=”Email Us Now”] it will add a button to your page that says “Email Us Now” and will pop open the contact form when clicked.

If you had a location named “Bill’s Cars” and a location named “Sam’s Cars” and you wanted to create a popup service form for each of them on the same page you’d add the following shortcodes

[service_quote send_to=”Bill’s Cars” popup_id=”1″ popup_button=”Get a Service Quote from Bill”]
[service_quote send_to=”Sam’s Cars” popup_id=”2″ popup_button=”Get a Service Quote from Sam”]

Other Shortcodes

People often ask if there is a shortcode to insert inventory into any page. You can do this with our Advanced Search PlugIn – it lets you put a dynamic json driven inventory into any page.

There are a few other shortcodes that come with the Free Car Demon PlugIn that you might find handy.

[search_form] – comes with one argument, “size”. If you set it to “0” it will return the small narrow search form, set it to “1” it will give you the small wide search form and if you set it to “2” it will give you the full search form.

So to add a full sized search form to a page you’d add [search_form size=”2″].

[search_box] – adds a keyword vehicle search box to your page. Setting the argument “button” you can control what the buttons says. Setting the argument “message” will change the text that appears in front of the search form.

This [search_box button=”Search Cars” message=”Search by Keyword”] would create a search box that says “Search by Keyword” right before it and a button that says “Search Cars”.

The [highlight_staff staff_id=”1″] shortcode must be used with the staff_id argument. You must create a user for each staff person, make them subscribers. After you create them visit their edit user page and fill in all of the Car Demon settings, including their staff position and contact information. You can also use the argument ‘contact_button’ to change what the contact form button says.

The last shortcode is [staff_page] this will display the entire staff in their corporate order. ie. General Manager first, Sales Staff below. It follows the order of the staff positions given on the user profile pages.

We hope this helps you understand the shortcodes native to the Car Demon PlugIn and will give you a few ideas on how you can structure your pages and content.

We’ve set up a few demo sites so you can see Car Demon in action.

Each demo site has a small pre-loaded inventory with one photo on each vehicle. Only a minimal amount of information has been added to the inventory, just enough to let you see some of the possibilities.

We’ve seen some sites created by our users that just blow us away. All it takes is a little creativity and you can build a lead generating machine that will leave the competition in the dust.

It’s been 10 months since that last update to Car Demon. The last year has been a busy one and we’ve worked hard on making lots of changes.

The biggest change is the new “Content Replacement” feature that makes Car Demon compatible with a much wider range of themes, right out of the box.

There have been lots of changes under the hood too. Hopefully those changes will only be noticed as an increase in speed and performance.

You might also notice that we’ve split from CarDemonsPro.com – they’re great people but it simply made better sense to take back control of the PlugIn so we can give it and the add-ons the full attention it deserves.

In closing we want to thank everyone for their support and look forward to bringing you even more wicked powers!

The CarDemon PlugIn was a labor of love created by a workaholic IT Administrator and a community of hundreds of volunteers.

It would be impossible to list the number of people who write code, beta test features, provide support, write themes, write plugins, sell services and more. This community of people knows who they are and for each one we give thanks and hope they take pride in what they helped to create.

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Reviews & Testimonials

Average Rating

4.7 out of 5 stars

PKHarmon

Superb customer service and a powerful plugin

I'm very pleased with what I've been able to accomplish with this plugin. By making use of a couple of the Car Demon add-ons, we have ended up with a finished product that is all that we had hoped it could be. But even more impressive is the support that we have received along the way. Jay's [...]customer service is superb! He's quick to respond, honest and helpful. He has gone above and beyond to help us get Car Demon set up on our website just as we want it.Read more »

July 10, 2017

christophschubert

Great functionality & amazing support

Added this plugin with the import inventory plugin (Also Car Demon) to use with a data feed from Auto-trader. *note- Currently only the development version lets you implement the AutoTrader feed due to the use of a Caret as a separator (^). [...]
It was a learning curve to get everything into place but Jay from the support team went above and beyond to ensure that I got it in place and functioning for the client!
Thanks again!Read more »

May 16, 2017

dominikh

great Plugin & Support

very impressed with this plugin and ended up upgrading it. Well it was having issues with my theme. I emailed and these guys were extremely professional. Got my theme working with the plugin and even did some extra things I had asked for looks wise. Could not be happier. I wish every plugin was [...]supported this well.Read more »

February 21, 2017

modvora

Great way to jumpstart a dealership website

Contains all of the basics that are needed to get started with this type of website. Lots of features and configurable options. The plugin does a good job at generating the required pages in the settings area of the plugin UI. Not all features will be needed for every dealership (multiple locations [...]and departments for example), but the plugin is very flexible in accommodating a variety of different sized dealerships.
The CSS included with the plugin is not beautiful, but will probably modified to fit your site anyway. For those users not able to code CSS then the premium themes available for the plugin will take care of that problem.Read more »

February 4, 2017

alexvlc

Works but vin lookup vendor unresponsive

The plugin is fine. The included vin lookup company is unreliable and does not respond to any communications via their contact form, email, or telephone. Their website seems to work but a client did not get a confirming and for many weeks he and I have been unable to get a response. Car Demon [...]advised they can quote to custom build to get the data from another source.Read more »

December 28, 2016

PegWeb

Excellent Support!

We purchased several of the premium plugins for the CarDemon plugin. We had some troubles getting the data to import correctly and then it was doing some other strange things but I highly recommend it because they stand behind the product. They continued to help us work through all of the bugs [...]squashing them one by one until everything was working like it should be. Very impressed with their customer service. They never once tried to blame our theme or our host or anything else. They just made it work.Read more »

November 28, 2016

worland

Customisable for AutoTrader UK

Great Plugin,Great Support! With the second to none, help from the Support team at CarDemons I was able to customise this plugin to work with the stock export from AutoTrader UK. - Fantastic plugin, Thanks.

October 10, 2016

hasmer

Best plugin for Car Dealer

This product is the best product out there for Car Dealers. I have used it in production.
It isn't just the product that makes my experience positive, the tech support folks are so helpful as well...especially Jay. They are willing to help and point you in the right direction. 5 Stars.

September 3, 2016

jfoutch1

Awesome plugin and amazing support!

I decided on this plugin to use for listing trucks that have unusual spec options. It has a nice, clean looking front end that displays your listings and an easy to use back end to edit your listings. I am very happy with every aspect of this plugin and will recommend it to any developer friends [...]looking for a vehicle listing plugin. I also plan on using it again for a car dealership website I have coming up in the near future.
As I mentioned, some custom options were required to meet my needs. I am not a PHP developer and have trouble in that area. Jay, the developer of this plugin, was extremely helpful. I emailed him many, many times and he was always more than happy to give me tips and pointers as to where I was going
wrong in my code. He also offers customization packages at a very reasonable rate, if you would like to have him do it all for you.
I purchased the import add-on with this plugin. We will be importing our inventory into this plugin directly from SalesForce. It took a little tweaking to get the imports working but it wasn't really a big deal after Jay's help.
So shout out to Jay for going above and beyond to help me achieve my goals.
Thanks,
JesseRead more »

September 3, 2016

simplysupra

Awesome plugin from a great developer

Having purchased the premium version of shortcode for Car Demons plugin, I have had a handful of customizations that needed to be made, as well as dicsovering a small bug that was being caused by my specific theme. [...]Through out all of my requests for support, Jay handled everything with 5, even 6 star service. He responds nearly immediately, works incredibly hard to ensure your satisfaction, and maintains awesome communication standards through out the entire support process.
The plug in itself is fantastic, and the support level is even better. 10/10 would recommend this plug in to anyone listing items for sale on their page, even outside of cars!Read more »